On The RecordMusic, Life and everything else2016-12-09T13:47:26Zhttp://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/ontherecord/feed/atom/Jim Carrollhttp://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/ontherecord/http://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/ontherecord/?p=339882016-12-08T16:47:45Z2016-12-09T13:47:26ZYou’ll find this week’s On the Record column from The Ticket here. “One of Live Nation’s biggest new earners is the secondary ticketing market, thanks to their ownership of the Get Me In and Seatwave websites. Live-music fans will know these sites as places to buy tickets for sold-out shows if they’re prepared to pay a mark-up in price. Live Nation shareholders, meanwhile, will know this as the sector which delivered a 34 per cent growth for the company in 2015 and $1.2 billion in cash.”
]]>0Jim Carrollhttp://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/ontherecord/http://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/ontherecord/?p=339782016-12-08T17:10:49Z2016-12-09T09:40:40ZTony MacMahon “Farewell to Music” (Raelach)

]]>0Jim Carrollhttp://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/ontherecord/http://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/ontherecord/?p=340302016-12-08T10:02:11Z2016-12-08T10:02:11ZEvery week, we highlight a couple of new acts from around the globe who’ve caught our attention. Please feel free to share tips with us or check out all past New Music selections here.

For a start, Filippo Bonamici’s voice is a cracker. Sure, it will remind you of people like Tom Waits and others with a distinctive soulful croak, but this Rome-born, Dublin-reared and currently Berlin-based lad is well capable of writing his own story in time. “Like Eye Did” is a raspy folk/soul tune with fantastic punch and pull which augers well for future adventures.

A Los Angeles native now based in Austin, Texas, Molly Burch’s tunes to date like “I Adore You” and “Downhearted” are grabbing attention left, right and centre. There’s a debut album “Please Be Mine” due in February 2017 and you can expect a lot of type about Burch’s superb easy-over voice, throwback musical stylings and a winning way with infectious melodies and lonesome themes.

Expect to hear a great deal about Australian pop singer Jessica Cerro in 2017 and beyond. She’s already done the hard work down under with her debut album “Glorious Heights” neatly bringing together her career to date. Judging by the sparky way tunes like “Because I Love You” turn into earworks, she’s someone who has the smarts to get traction in the northern as well as southern hemisphere.

]]>0Jim Carrollhttp://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/ontherecord/http://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/ontherecord/?p=340252016-12-07T11:07:51Z2016-12-07T11:07:51ZEvery single day, our social media timelines are full of stuff. It could be people talking about what happened last night, it could be someone sharing some silly joke, it could be Donald Trump saying stuff that you never thought you’d hear the incoming president of the United States saying. And it’s also full of people selling goods and services for brands because they happen to have a big social media presence.

Social media influencers are the ones whose tweets, Facebook posts, Snapchat snaps, Instagram posts, digital articles and videos attract big audiences and are therefore hugel attractive to brands, agencies and companies who want to reach that mass of people. A new school of marketing and PR, social media influencers have become a big part of the promotional landscape in Ireland and worldwide over the last year to 18 months.

But it’s a trend with a lot of questions around it, apart from the one about how many Twitter or Instagram followers you need to have to qualify for the title. Are punters who are looking at these posts and photos aware that money has changed hand? Are the rules around declarations of interest stong enough? Just how much money are we talking about anyway? Are social media influencers here to stay and should we get used to them? Does it actually work and is it better than taking out an old-fashioned online ad? How do brands gauge the success of otherwise of what they’re doing with influencers? Who are the winners and losers? And what comes next?

The details: Banter on social media influencers will take place at Wigwam (Middle Abbey St., Dublin 1) on Thursday January 19. Doors open at 6pm and the discussion will get underway at 6.30pm. Tickets can be booked here.

]]>0Jim Carrollhttp://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/ontherecord/http://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/ontherecord/?p=339902016-12-06T11:34:08Z2016-12-06T09:52:48ZThe only stimulant I rely on these days is music. Of course, there are substances in that pot of Barry’s tea and endorphins from the running, but it’s music which keeps me high these days. You put on something new and you hope for a hit, the only time you get hit and feel no pain. You put on something familiar to reach for the same sort of feeling that those hygge nuts rave about. You can analyse, critique, review, mine and parse it all you like, but the only way to truly understand what is happening is to experience it firsthand. Put on the music, sit back and wait for the connection to the source to do its magic.

Usually these days, I hear most music at home. Spotify, Soundcloud, Bandcamp and a dozen other ways to listen to music in 2016 bring music right to the kitchen table or office desk. Sometimes, though, you have to leave the house and hit the road and find the right setting. Sometimes, you have to travel for a couple of hours to find the right setting to make sense of it all.

The setting, though, has to be really right. No halfways and certainly no fields. 2016 was the year when I finally accepted that music festivals are the worst place in the world to hear music. With the exception of those new music showcases where checking out new bands are the only reason the event is on, the other ones on the circuit are not fit for that purpose any longer. They’re for circus acts and carnival barkers, for IRL meetings and encounters with your social network, for large multinational conglomerates to make money from butting in on the cultural conversation, for this and that and the other. But they’re not for music. As I’ve said before and will probably say again, big fields are for cows and hurling not live music.

But, you know, #NotAllLiveMusic. There are times when a particular act in a particular room on a particular day and time just makes more than sense. Your synapses click what’s going on and you’re fully aware that there’s nowhere else you should be right now.

I’ve been going down to Other Voices in Dingle since 2012 to host Banter as part of the festival in a pub and hardware shop called Foxy John’s (this is called a declaration of interests). You go in for a drink, squeeze your way into the back room to hear some randomers having a conversation by the open fire about some dude called Tara Browne or hoovers and NASA and go home with a hammer and box of nails. It’s that sort of place. Every town probably needs an establishment like this. Maybe two, in case the first one runs out of bulbs or screws.

Over the years, Other Voices has turned and twisted and mutated and morphed into a much different sort of look than was the case when Philip King and Glen Hansard initially compiled a list of artists in 2002 and put a TV show around those names. Times change. The singer-songwriters who made the excursion to the wilds of west Kerry 15 years ago were very much a product of that time and environment. Most of them are still in business, but Other Voices has moved on and mooched on. International acts began to travel to the southwest, the event became more than just about what was recorded for the TV screen and Other Voices became a pre-Christmas gathering for around 5,000 people (read Una Mullally and Laurence Mackin’s piece for more on this transition).

Yet for all these changes, the main Other Voices’ action is still centred on the gigs in the church each evening. No matter how much else happens in Dingle around those few days, the gigs on the music trail or the talking at Ireland’s Edge, those shows are still the reason why all of this happens. We wouldn’t be here other than for the fact that a TV show shoot is happening. Like Kelis and her milkshake, the TV cameras bring all the boys and girls to the yard in the first place. The fact that there’s nothing else happening on those evenings bar the church shows and the streaming of those performances to bars around the town re-enforces this statement of intent.

Moreover, it’s the acts who play in the church who are very much the meat and drink of that statement of intent. This is where the festival gets to set out its stall and make its party political broadcast on behalf of the musical stirrings and goings-on of the moment. That’s what you watch for and listen for. The presence of three acts in particular – Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh and Cormac Begley, Girl Band and Rusangano Family – were in bold and italic 48 size print on this year’s statement. This indicated a different cut to the proceedings, another slant, another lean, another mutation.

Sometimes you need to shake things up and putting on a bunch of Irish acts who don’t conform to what we’ve kind of assumed Irish acts to be over the last few years is worth noting. You can’t make any assumptions about Irish acts anymore. Many like me will claim you never could, but the wider industry always did and honed in on either singer-songwriters or a certain kind of polished, melodic big music-y indie-pop. That was the sound of the island and we produced plenty of acts who conformed to that bias. We also produced a ton of other types, but the traction always seemed to go the other way.

The pendulum is now swinging back. Watching the three acts above over the weekend in the Church of St James was a lesson in upending perceptions. The prowling menace of Girl Band coming on strong with instruments raised and fully armed, the magnificently pure blast and intrigue of Ó Raghallaigh and Begley tearing through improvised pieces and tunes from back west, the exuberent celebration and probing questions inherent in how Rusangano Family roll: here are three acts who couldn’t be from anywhere else but here, yet who buck much of what we think this particular landscape is about.

It was a redefiniton and a redrawing of musical lines at the same time as a taking stock of what was really in the cupboard. How these acts got here and what they brought here is for the musicologists to work out in time, but there was a spirit in the pews and aisles as the three acts played that kind of took your breath away. You could enjoy it for the moment, the raw emotion of the moment, but you could also dig deep and extrapolate all kinds of things if that was your wont.

For me, those performances took me back to where I came in a dozen paragraphs ago. It was a hit, a bona-fide immersion into a world where music mattered as much to me as it did the first tine as a teenage galoot in Tipperary trying to work it all out at warp speed. In a year when everything was topsy-turvey and insideout and roundabout, it was a reminder of the power of music at its damn finest – and that’s a drug that will always work.

]]>0Jim Carrollhttp://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/ontherecord/http://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/ontherecord/?p=339802016-12-05T16:37:55Z2016-12-05T16:37:55ZDublin’s Trinity College may be about to become a venue for a series of large-scale live shows in 2017.

According to a number of OTR sources, promoters MCD have obtained permission from the college to host a number of open-air 5000-capacity shows on the campus next summer. It is thought that there may be up to 10 different shows during the run.

MCD already book the Trinity Ball which is held on the college campus every year.

More information as it comes to hand.

]]>0Jim Carrollhttp://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/ontherecord/http://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/ontherecord/?p=339452016-12-01T07:28:04Z2016-12-02T13:25:57ZYou’ll find this week’s On the Record column from The Ticket here. “What the hell is an artist who has already released three albums and collaborated on a ton of other releases over the past two years doing on a hot list for 2017? Sure he should have been on the sound-of-2015 or sound-of-2016 lists before all this fuss began? Isn’t spotting future breakout stars what this list is supposed to be all about?”
]]>0Jim Carrollhttp://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/ontherecord/http://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/ontherecord/?p=338752016-12-02T08:28:08Z2016-12-02T09:29:28ZMax Richter “On the Nature of Daylight” (StudioRichter)

Gold medal winning instrumental soul from composer Toby Pazbner and a band which includes members of such bands as El Michels Affair, Menahan Street Band, Budos Band, Charles Bradley, Lee Fields The Dap-Kings and The Arcs.

Spiritual jazz classic taken from the welcome reissue of his 1973 classic album “Dini Safarrar”

]]>0Jim Carrollhttp://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/ontherecord/http://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/ontherecord/?p=339602016-12-01T08:20:55Z2016-12-01T09:45:30ZEvery week, we highlight a couple of new acts from around the globe who’ve caught our attention. Please feel free to share tips with us or check out all past New Music selections here.

Formerly of Ex Cops, Brian Harding’s new project came together in Los Angeles where he joined forces with producer Andrew Miller to work on songs which are full of jagged, infectious hooks and beautiful emotional lyrical notes. Album due in early 2017 but, for now, put “Hurricanes” on repeat.

All year lomg, Atlanta’s 6LACK has been making the right noises with a procession of really strong, hooky tracks which keep getting better and better as they drop. We really like the fresh cut of “Rules” and “PRBLMS” from his just-out debut set “FREE 6LACK” which showcases the college dropout’s warped, weird and wild alt-r’n'b.

From Washington DC, Ari Lennox’s new seven-track “Pho” EP for J Cole’s Dreamville label is a wonderful showcase for that distinctive, striking soulful purr of a voice and her jazzy take on Baduism. In a year when we’ve seen some strong bohosoul releases (stand tall Kendra Foster and Kadhja Bonet), this is another one to treasure

]]>0Jim Carrollhttp://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/ontherecord/http://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/ontherecord/?p=338572016-11-30T09:34:38Z2016-11-30T09:34:38ZIrish music fans hearing about the cancellation of Scottish festival T In the Park may have felt a sense of deja-vu about the news. After all, a lot of the factors around the decision by the festival’s promoters DF Concerts, a company which is owned by Live Nation and MCD’s Denis Desmond and Caroline Downey via their LN-Gaiety Holdings company, to not hold the festival in 2017 will be familiar from the demise of T’s Irish sister Oxegen a couple of years ago. Reading this report by Barry Nicolson, with its mentions of low turnouts for LCD Soundsystem and The War On Drugs in recent years, reminds you of how Oxegen failed to see the writing on the wall and ended up with The National playing to a couple of hundred people in 2011.

But changing musical tastes are not the only reason for the event’s problems. A move from its long-term home in Balado due to concerns over an oil pipeline running under the site to Srathallan Castle brought big problems with traffic, accessibility and ospreys all causing headaches for the organisers. After hundreds of complaints about the 2015 festival (even the ospreys registered their unhappiness), the festival introduced a big number of changes to ensure this year’s festival ran smoothly. However, T 2016 was marred by tragedy with a number of deaths and widespread crime, including the theft of an on-site ATM machine and an alleged rape, over the weekend.

A year on and the promoters have indeed done just this, with the Scottish Health and Safety Executive top of the blame list. Just as the Longitude city festival replaced Oxegen on the Irish event calendar, there is now talk of a non-camping festival in Glasgow as a replacement for T.

While the move to a new site was, by all accounts, a massive contribution to T In the Park’s problems, it was still pulling in the punters and, as we can see from the 2015 figures, contributing to profit for the promoters. However, it’s obvious that there comes a time when the bad outweighs the good and it becomes too onerous to carry on and so it is with T In the Park. Festival boss Geoff Ellis has said they’re “determined” to come back with a camping festival in 2018 but, as we saw with Oxegen, that’s often easier said than done. Unless it’s Glastonbury, which has no problem with a fallow year, events which take a year off have problems reconnecting with their audience on return.

But it’s worth noting that T’s demise does not necessarily mean a dip in popularity for the big camping festival. It’s obvious from the fact that 70,000 people showed up for T 2016 and the ongoing success of such mass market events as the Electric Picnic, Reading/Leeds and Glastonbury that there is still a huge audience for camping festivals. This trend is not going anywhere soon as there is still a throughput of punters who want to set up their tents in a field and listen to rock and pop in the open-air, which is good news for live music accountants.

The question for promoters, though, is if the pay-off is still worth it, given all the problems and issues with crowd management, policing and health and safety which now come as part of putting on the show in a big field or castle. The live music industry has made huge bets over the last decade on the festival sector and it’s become a vital cog in how the macro industry conducts its business, as well as providing a festival tourism economic boost in the event’s immediate hinterland. Keeping the festival show on the road then is now vital for so many vested interests that any more bumps on the road may have serious repercussions for more than just those who’ll miss next year’s T In the Park fun and games.